National News

Peter Lanza tells his story

by Evann Gastaldo, Newser Staff

(NEWSER) – More than a year after his son killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Peter Lanza is talking. Lanza met with Andrew Solomon six times starting last fall, and the result is an extensive, nearly 7,600-word profile in the New Yorker in which Lanza says of son Adam, "You can't get any more evil." He goes so far as to say that he wishes Adam, whom he hadn't seen for two years at the time of the shootings, had never been born. But when Adam was a child, he and his father were exceptionally close; Adam was "just a normal little weird kid," Lanza says. In fact, as Adam grew older and his mental health deteriorated, Lanza and wife Nancy, who were in the process of divorcing, didn't look for any explanation beyond Adam's diagnosis of Asperger's. "Let's keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird," Lanza says. But now, he wonders if that diagnosis "veiled a contaminant," some more dangerous problem: "I was thinking it could mask schizophrenia," he says.